The Walrus and the Honey Bee2 Jan 2025

Queen Rearing - Timings and Workflow

Intro and reasons for not using an AI reader.

01:30 Reasons for making queens

02:35 Importance of being organised, knowing timings, mindset - sometimes things go wrong

03:19 Breeder queens, Steve's three breeder queens in 2024 and why these were selected

06:45 Keeping breeder queens in nucleus hives

07:40 Drones, open mating, using drone comb

08:20 Using BeeBase

09:20 Re-queening poor colonies

10:08 Cell builders, double nuc method compared to Brother Adam method

12:50 Grafting day, checking for queen cells

14:50 Well fed larvae for grafting, two different grafting methods

17:50 Avoiding brace comb being build across queen cells

19:00 Removing queen cells and moving to the incubator

20:00 Effects of different incubation temperatures on queen development time and colour

21:30 Keeping the cell builder going through summer, bottlenecks in production

23:40 It's ok if you don't have an incubator

24:20 Mating nucs, Carricel portable incubator, cell protectors

25:20 Mini-plus hives and Kieler nucs, Steve much prefers Mini-plus and is phasing out the Kielers. Setting up a Kieler nuc for first use.

27:50 If queens don't get mated in 2-3 weeks they are replaced with a new cell

30:00 Advantages of Mini-plus, importance of letting queens mature for a month or more before introducing to a new colony

32:00 Over-wintering queens in nucs, re-queening production colonies after their second season, push-in cages

34:30 Failure to mate, drone laying queens

35:30 Making queens is very worthwhile, visit the blog post to view relevant images.

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